The City Council met: Will the city find a new location for the Forced Labour Memorial? + Video

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A town thrives on optimism, on the feeling that things are moving forward and life goes on. But what if the town is financially strangled? Then the town council’s ability to even draft and pass meaningful motions begins to dwindle. Even when – as in the case of the Forced Labour Memorial – the aim is to safeguard the years of dedicated work carried out by the sponsoring association. For that association has done pioneering work.

This was highlighted at the council meeting on 1 July not only by Dr Gesine Mertens, who presented the Green Party group’s current motion – which asks the administration to help the memorial’s sponsoring association find larger premises – but also by:

“The Lord Mayor is instructed to support the Memorial to Forced Labour in its search for new premises, in doing so, suitable buildings or sites owned by the city and its subsidiaries, by the Free State or by the federal government, as well as the building of the former concentration camp satellite camp on Kamenzer Straße, will be examined.”

Dr Beate Ehms of the Left Party parliamentary group and Falk Dossin of the CDU parliamentary group also emphasised the importance of the project. After all, Beate Ehms is quite right: in both East and West, the issue of forced labour was effectively hushed up for decades. The fact that 75,000 men and women from across Europe were also forced to perform forced labour in Leipzig – and under the most appalling conditions – has only been systematically addressed in recent years.

At that time, there were 600 assembly camps for forced labourers in Leipzig. No fewer than 10,000 people forced into labour were employed in the HASAG factory sections, which also play a central role in the work of the Forced Labour Memorial.

Until now, the memorial has been housed in the old HASAG gatehouse on Permoser Straße. However, even the archive – which has grown considerably in recent years – has now outgrown the space.

This is precisely the moment when such a project needs support to take its work to the next level. Yet right now, Leipzig is in the midst of its worst financial crisis in 35 years. And on 1 July, AfD city councillor Jörg Kühne took full advantage of this to call into question the very funding for the Forced Labour Memorial. After all, since 2023, Leipzig has had the ‘Culture of Remembrance Concept’ adopted by the city council. It would therefore be downright wrong to give special funding to individual projects.

Remembrance, yes, but please not in any specific form?

The undertone was unmistakable, even though Kühne repeatedly insisted that remembering the crimes of the Nazi era was close to the AfD’s heart. SPD city councillor Marius Wittwer subsequently accused him of using the wrong tone.

An accusation to which Kühne then responded with a long lament. Even though the choice of words in his speech had been clear. In reference to the Greens’ motion, he had spoken of “symbolic resolutions”.

The AfD parliamentary group’s amendment read exactly the same: “The City of Leipzig should concentrate on implementing its already adopted remembrance strategy, rather than justifying special claims by individual organisations through a constant stream of new individual resolutions. It is not the City Council’s role to search for premises on behalf of individual organisations or to grant them special promises of support outside established funding procedures or the city’s normal administrative processes.”

This was clearly a refusal to help the Forced Labour Memorial in its search for suitable premises.

However, it is the AfD parliamentary group alone in the City Council that thinks this way. The AfD group’s motion not to assist the Memorial was rejected by 11 votes to 48.

Although Falk Dossin had put the administration’s position to the vote, it was not voted on in its entirety, as the AfD group wanted a vote on each point individually.

As a result, two points from the administration’s position and two from the Greens’ original motion ultimately received a clear majority. And among these was the Greens’ request that the city assist the memorial in finding a new location.